SOLO Activity: Command line interface

A command line interface (CLI) is a good way to allow non-developers to use your software. In the previous lesson we saw how we can separate the functionality of your software from the user interface by creating a module with the core functionality and a script to provide the user interface.

Using the example project we developed earlier:

1. Update the scripts/sim_catalog file so that it now has two argument groups,
   1. The current group1 should have a title of “Program settings”
   2. The second group (group2) should have a title of “Metadata”
2. Add the following parameters to group2:
   • --version, which will print the version
   • --date, to show the last modified date
   • --author, to list the authors
3. All the parameters in group2 should have a default value of False, and then use action='store_true' to set the parameter to True when this option is supplied by the user.
4. [Optional] Provide shortened versions of the parameters in group2 of the format -c etc..
5. Write the necessary code so that when any of the options in group2 are set, all the required information is printed and the program exits without performing the simulation.
   • For now you’ll have to define some variables within the script to hold these values, but later on we’ll demonstrate a better place to store them.